How To Make Laminated Print and Play Cards

[Music] hi everybody Martin here and today I thought I would do a quick how-to video and the topic of this one is how to make a print and play game cards using a laminator so laminated print and play game cards if you have checked out some of the other videos in my channel you'll know that a few months back I did a how-to on how to make printed play game cards with three layers using a plain paper front playing paper back card stock in the middle and then some gluing and some you know some enamel a spray enamel on them and and and you know it's pretty involved it's a grits away it's a great way to make cards for print and play games but it's also pretty time-consuming and there's a lot more effort involved so I've recently started a much simpler technique which involves laminating the cards and I thought that I would share that with you today so let's talk about materials and equipment what are you gonna need if you want to start making print and play game cards using the laminator method well first of all and most obviously as the name implies you're gonna need a laminator so I just happened to have here my amazonbasics thermal laminator and this guy is the base model it cost about 20 bucks on Amazon and as you'll see here on the back here it has two settings it has settings for three mill laminator sheets and five mill laminator sheets and I only ever use the five mill setting even if I'm using three mill sheets which is I what I am so you need a laminator amazonbasics thermal laminator is the one that I have and you'll notice it's already on it's already ready to start laminating and of course as soon as I mention it the ready light turns off I guess I've got shy but hopefully that light will come back in a minute as well you're going to need some laminating sheets and no surprise here I'm using the amazonbasics letter-size laminating pouches these are three mil okay please come in the pack of 100 I forget exactly how much of this cost me I want to say it was around $10 but I'm not 100% sure but yeah so pocket 100 letter size laminating pouches this is three mil so yeah you're probably wondering Martin why do you get three mil pouches if you're using the five mil setting on the laminator great question it's because I want there to be more heat the more heat there is the more that the laminate will fuse to the paper the cardstock that I'm using so speaking of paper I am using cardstock and I've already got this printed out so this is a game that I'll be showing you today this is a kind of a Star Wars wreath eeeem of a game called eminent domain microcosm which is available on BoardGameGeek and if I remember too I will place a link where you can download the print and play version of eminent domain microcosm as well as the Star Wars we themed all of these files a little bit are available on BoardGameGeek but anyway the point is I wanted to show off this is just basic cardstock paper this particular one is the brand is georgia-pacific and I buy it at Walmart for about $5 for a pack of 150 sheets this is 110 pound cardstock and once again the brand is georgia-pacific so that's what I use it's the only paper I use and as you can see I print on it double-sided all right what else are we going to be using today we are going to be using to cut the cards we're going to be using a paper trimmer this is the one that I have it's called a fist scars paper trimmer this is generally for scrapbooking or crafting as you can see it's not very heavy-duty and it doesn't need to be but what I like about this guy is that it has I don't know if you can totally see it but there is a guide wire down the center here which helps it makes it really easy for me to tell if I have aligned what I want to cut straight so that I get straight cuts using a paper trimmer like this all right so Fiskars paper trimmer I want to say that I bought this brand new from Amazon for around fifteen to twenty dollars and finally how are we going to get some nice rounded corners on our laminated cards you've heard me talk about this before the kado Morrow pro corner rounder accept nothing less this guy is less than ten dollars and I get it on Amazon and very famously whenever you buy one of these allows six to eight weeks for delivery it does come from Japan I believe it comes from but this is pretty much the best bang for buck when it comes to corner rounders okay so laminator laminating sheets three mil paper trimmer corner rounder and 110 pound cardstock looks like we are all ready to do some printed play cards using the laminator technique so join me at the table join me at the work table and we'll get started right the first step is we have to go to BoardGameGeek and we have to get the files that we're going to print out for this project so this game is called eminent domain microcosm and here is the page on BoardGameGeek in the browser and if you scroll down to the file section over here and click on files then you will find all of the files that are associated with this game here is the PNP the print and play for the actual game eminent domain microcosm but the one that I'm interested today is the Star Wars Rieti so there's one in French and then someone made an English version so this is the file name Star Wars microcosm dark neko version in English so I've clicked on that and then you go ahead and you download that PDF and then this is what it's going to look like and it's eight pages and it's nicely laid out in card fronts and backs which means if you have a printer capable of a double-sided printing then you are all set to just go and hit the print button make sure that you are your printer is set to print double-sided and make sure that it won't resize the page or anything like that printed natively or whatever prints page size you're comfortable with a4 or u.s. letter hit print on that so once you've done that you should start getting sheets that look like this so and by the way I'm printing on cardstock as I mentioned earlier so prints on the front and then the card backs are on the back of the sheet as well card front card backs cool so that step one is to get the print and play file and get it printed on a double sided fashion on your cardstock step two is you want to be able to then put it into your laminating sheets so here is one of the three male laminating sheets that I've got from my from my Amazon basics shipment so you open one of these guys up like so and you take one of your printed pages and then you insert it and just make sure that it's um you know covered with in there kind of the basic center of the laminate you don't have to be too precise with this then you cover that guy up so that is now sandwiched in between the laminate on both sides I'll do that one more time over here for the other sheet as you can see there you go you don't have to be too precise I don't really care about centering the sheet here's on this side or this side because you know what I'm gonna cut this all any way later now once we've got them in the sheets the next step is you then want to run them through your laminator so let me get my laminator in the pit in the frame here all right hopefully you guys can see that and we are now simply going to insert our printed sheets in the card stock inside of the three ml laminating pouch into the laminator which as I've ensured is set to five mil so even if these are three mil sheets I've set the laminator to five mil and we're gonna go ahead and insert and you push it forward enough and then the pinch rollers inside the laminator catch and then it just starts kind of magically pulling the pouch with the contents through the laminator and it takes a little less than a minute per sheet and what we're gonna want to do and so here's the thing here's a secret while we're waiting for this to finish um you want the real the reason why I set it to five mil even if it's a three mil pouches because I want the heat to be so intense that the laminate actually fuses with the paper right so I'm not really interested in just having lemonade fused to lemonade I wanted to fuse with the paper and the reason why I want to do that is because when I cut this I want to be able to cut all the way through I don't want to have you know like when you laminate ID cards or whatever and then there's still like excess laminate on the sides I'm not interested in that I want my cards to look pretty much like regular playing cards so once this guy is finished then the other thing that I do on each and every sheet so as you can see here we've already finished laminating one pass and why do I say one pass because I'm gonna turn right around and do it a second time that's right every one of these sheets I laminate them twice there you go and you can probably guess why I laminate them why I run them through the laminator twice is because I am obsessed with getting enough heat going on so that that laminate really just fuses into the cardstock so that is the rationale there that is the why I've already done a couple more so this is what the fully laminated sheets look like like so and we've got one more to do and then once we've got the lamination done then we're gonna move on to the cutting and trimming of these cards so all right we're done with the lamination phase here's the result we've got four double-sided printed sheets of card stock fully laminated and each one of these has been run through that laminator twice right to get that really really nice fusing of the laminate to the card stock going on okay so now the next step is we want to start cutting using our fist scars paper trimmer and my best practice that I've started doing which I actually didn't mention in my previous video on how to make printed play game cards is you should always cut from the back so not from the card front but from the card back and the reason for that is that if there is a slight lack of registration or slight misalignment between the card fronts and the card backs that won't be obvious from the backside it'll be obvious from the front side that faces you which is not as critical but if you've got cards that are obviously kind of marked or misaligned on the back and that might make it impossible for you to actually be able to play that with other people or with yourself because you'll be able to tell what card it is from the imperfection on the back so best practice always cut from the backside so we're gonna start with this sheet right over here but we're gonna start in right now and like I said one of the nice things I really like about this paper trimmer is it has a guide wire right down this Center shaft and that'll tell me where the blade is going to be passing and so ideally your printed play file has some crop marks or cut marks and you can align that with that guide wire and then you'll know exactly where your blade is going to pass so I've gone ahead and done that for this side right here and remember I am cutting from the back all right okay so in other videos I've cut using a rotary cutter and cork back metal ruler and a self-healing mat and while I still do like that for its precision I have to say that you know using a paper trimmer is just a very very easy way to cut things all right right here's a little status update after cutting through the first sheet here are the cards as they come out showing you the Front's now I'm showing you the backs and as you can see everything looks pretty well aligned and the other thing I like about the lamination method is that the cards slide pretty smoothly against each other and the way that they feel is very very similar to normal playing cards and you can actually riffle shuffle cards produced in this manner as long as you're using a satisfying thickness of cardstock and the two layers of laminate on the front and the back and as you can see I've cut all the way to the quick I'm not bothering to leave any excess laminate at the edges here because if you've done your job correctly then you know as I keep saying the laminate has fused to the cardstock so you don't have to worry about leaving like a little strip of just bare lamb and on this on the edges I cut all the way to just where the card is I cut them like normal print and play cards is what I'm trying to say okay so we're gonna keep going we're gonna cut down these three remaining sheets and then we're gonna move on to the corner rounding see okay so we're all done with the cutting here's all the excess laminate and paper that we trimmed off of these cards and here are all the cards and hopefully you can see as they come flashing by that they're all pretty satisfyingly aligned on the fronts and on the backs they're looking good now these are 34 cards there you go 136 corners that I have to round and I'm gonna go ahead and do that with mica tomorrow Pro corner rounder set to the medium setting so if you have standard sized poker size playing cards like this I generally like to round the card corners at the medium setting so we're gonna go get started and that is what a card is gonna look like with the corners rounded and we're just gonna keep on doing that a hundred and thirty more times and then we will essentially be done all right we are done rounding our card corners here is the deck let's go ahead and get them squared away and voila we are now done with our print and play game cards front back nicely laminated and they feel good inside my hands they feel good in my hands and they you know kind of go on the table very nicely they have a little bit of snap when you when you you know kind of run them against each other like that just like you would expect a normal playing card or a retail playing card to have so I like that aspect of it and you know I'm not very good at shuffling but I'll show you how these guys shuffle as well now you're gonna make me all self-conscious about my shuffling skills people are gonna make fun of me I know see horrible and horrible at shuffling but hopefully you're getting the idea is one dropped I'm gonna pick it up off the ground you get the idea that these cards using the laminating method pretty much have come very close to approximating the look and feel of regular playing cards aside from being a little bit glossy ER because they're they're laminated you know rather than the kind of matte finish that regular playing cards have okay so I hope that you have enjoyed and learned something from my quick tutorial about how to make print and play game cards using the lamination method I am very pleased with how these cards come out and the production time for these cards these 34 cards took me a little less than an hour from printing all the way through the process to the corner rounding and then having a playable deck of print and play cards so this is my current favorite method of making print and play cards it's faster it's easier and it generates cards that have that kind of satisfying snap going on unlike the cards that I was making before that are full of that look good but don't have that snap so this is this is the way to go for me for right now and for the future for the foreseeable future I'll be many print to play games I'll be making I'll be using the lamination method until next time this has been Martin and we'll see you next time on my printed play channel which I've called the cut

Channel: Martin Gonzalvez

Views: 134,124

Keywords: Print and Play, Board Games, Boardgamegeek, Gaming

Id: fws1hN782yw

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2019